Do you believe John McAfee is right about Bitcoin hitting $500,000 in 3 years? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

Answer by Vladimir Novakovski, 8.5 years in hedge funds, on Quora:

It’s interesting that almost all existing analysis of cryptoassets are from the point of view of fundamentals (or lack thereof). It’s often useful to look at things quantitatively instead.

So here, what we really want to understand is the probability of bitcoin reaching $500,000. There are a few ways to do that.
First, we can assume a completely random process and take a “gambler’s ruin” perspective. What is the probability that a random process will hit $500,000 before it hits $0? Given that the price as of Dec 2017 is about $15,000, we’d get $15,000/$500,000 = 3%.

Another approach is to model price as a lognormal process, which is a reasonable assumption to make for a broad set of assets. See Why do prices and income follow a log-normal distribution?